Terminal crimping machines for attaching terminal to magnet wire in the manufacturing of coils for motors and other similar equipment typically have a crimp height adjustment mechanism that is infinitely adjustable. This is used to achieve a particular desired crimp height for each of the large variety of wire number and size combinations that are typical in the industry. For example, any number of different sizes of magnet wires may be terminated in a given terminal, some of these terminations requiring solid wire or stranded wire leads extending therefrom. The adjustments needed to provide the variety of different crimp heights are tedious to make and require the services of a highly skilled operator, and in some cases involving the calculation of the circular mill area (CMA) of the conductors being terminated. In a production environment, where different size conductors and different numbers of conductors are frequently terminated, such adjustments can result in the expenditure of a significant amount of time. These adjustments are usually held to a minimum by arbitrarily selecting ranges of terminal and conductor sizes that will be run for a given crimp height setting. This is, of course, a compromise in that only one particular combination of terminal and conductor in each range will have the correct crimp height setting. Further, in some applications it is often desirable to use the same size and type terminal for all terminations independent of the number and size of the conductors, thereby requiring a relatively large range of adjustment for the varying desired crimp height.
What is needed is a terminal crimping machine having the capability to automatically provide the correct crimp height for each different terminal and conductor combination, independent of variations in the physical size of the terminal or the density of the conductors positioned in the crimping barrel of the terminal.